A few weeks back, I talked a bit about holding or targeting players with season long injuries in ottoneu leagues. The idea in that piece was to treat injured players like Prospects – you can’t be sure when they will be back, nor can you be confident in how they will perform.

When players are underpriced (say you have a $1 Patrick Corbin), you might as well hold them (or target them in trades). But when prices rise to more typical levels (say a $10 Corbin), there may be a different path forward, particularly for pitchers returning from Tommy John surgery.

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If it feels like you have spent every moment of Spring Training 2014 hoping that the next article you read is not about a pitcher you own (or one who plays for your favorite MLB team), you are not alone. The Braves have been hard hit, but they are not the only ones, and the latest pitcher to go down hit close to home for me.

Patrick Corbin has been a personal favorite for about a year now. It was just over two months ago that I implored you all to buy on Corbin and since I only give advice that I intend to take myself, the Diamondback hurler has found his way onto the majority of my teams. This seemed like a great thing until the last 24 hours or so, and suddenly I am left trying to figure out what to do with him.

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Bold predictions week is one of my favorite weeks of the year. As any of my friends will tell you, I love to make outlandish claims with little to no evidence to back them up, and then refuse to change them when faced with logic. But, now that I am an adult with a kid and a job and that kind of adult-y stuff, I need to be more rational most of the time.

For one week a year, though, I get to throw moderation to the wind, go with my gut, and drop some bombs. Of course, I love logical thought too much to not have reason behind my predictions, but they’ll be bold…oh, they’ll be bold.

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This is not a fun article to write. Although writing it may be better than how I got here. For the last few weeks, I have been telling you how I lay out my plans for auctions, and for the last few years, executing those plans has resulted in some terrific fantasy seasons. And then Sunday, March 9 happened.

It was set to be a busy day, with back-to-back three hour auctions scheduled, but was made even worse when I woke up with some sort of terrible stomach virus. Instead of hanging out with friends and auctioning, I was doing my best to grab the players I wanted between (and sometimes during) mad dashes for the bathroom. The resulting rosters were not what I had planned on, which is unfortunate for my fantasy seasons, but convenient for writing an article on how to recover from a failed auction.

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Or is that the victori? Either way, it’s definitely there, and you don’t even have to squint too hard to see it.

When the OF rankings were posted yesterday, I was aghast to see Shane Victorino ranked a lowly 52. Ok, maybe aghast is a strong word. But he was definitely behind a handful of guys I think he should be ahead of. And in the spirit of open discourse and wanting to justify my own love for the Red Sox outfielder, I set out to validate my disagreement.

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Last week over the course of two nights, the Second FanGraphs staff league held our annual auction. As always, I entered with a simple strategy – stay calm, nab the one or two big names you need, but mostly let the rest of the league cash out early, and clean up with sleepers and guys who slip through the cracks.

That didn’t work out so well this time. You can see the way the auction went here. If you scroll through far enough, you’ll see that those sleepers didn’t sleep and the guys falling through the cracks didn’t fall that far. An overabundance of caution led to moderate early prices and too much cash to spend later. So what’s an owner to do?

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I have heard from a handful of ottoneu players who have already auctioned, but for most of you, auction season is just kicking off, myself included. We are just a few weeks from Opening Day and Tuesday evening I’ll be sitting down to my first auction of the year.

And when I sit down, I’ll be organized. I’ll have two computers open (probably overkill, but it makes things easier). I’ll have almost everything closed down – no extra browser windows, no chat windows, maybe Twitter (but only so I can post updates and keep you all in the know). What I will have with me is five excel spreadsheets, four browser windows, and some snacks.

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To paraphrase (horribly butcher?) A Tale of Two Cities, prospects are the best of times and the worst of times for ottoneu owners. At least based on the number of questions I get about them.

The joy of ottoneu is you can sign that Double-A SS with the big bat and hope he develops into a star. The problem is how to find the right prospect. For every Mike Trout, there is an Andy Marte. Actually, for every Trout, there are about a billion Marte’s. And the chances are you, like me, are not a prospect evaluator, which makes it awfully hard to tell the difference.

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Over the next few weeks, my goal is going to be to do my best to help prepare you for the upcoming ottoneu auctions. But today, with the keeper deadline still fresh on all of our minds (I will have nightmares if Matt Moore strikes out everyone in sight this year…), I thought I’d stop and take a look at where we are today.

As of Friday night at midnight ET, every team in the ottoneu universe is (or at least should be) down to 40 or fewer players on the roster and $400 or less in salary spent, and that gives us a chance to see who all of you deemed worthy of keeping.

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The clock is ticking ever closer to the ottoneu keeper deadline and you now have less than a week to make your final cuts. By the end of the day (midnight ET) on January 31, your rosters need to be at or below 40 players and you have to have at least $1 in cap space for every open roster spot.

I know I am still making some hard choices – should I trade a $14 Jason Kipnis for a $32 Paul Goldschmidt? Which of my five $20+ pitchers and three $30+ OF should I keep? – and that is just in one league. So I thought I would take a look at those choices and hope that it can help you make your last cuts, as well.

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